Stay on target

It’s lately said that Disney is effectively taking over the world right now by making movies ostensibly for children but really aimed at the nostalgia and long-term genre-fandom sensibilities of 20, 30 and 40 year olds. With this one, they’ve apparently now decided that they’d also like to take whatever money folks 50 to 90 have lying around as well; since even though this is very much a “family film” that, like the original, skews to the sensibilities of the very youngest prospective audience members (with any remotely grownup-feeling jokes or plot points camoflauged safely in the margins) I feel like most of the actual “demand” for a Mary Poppins sequel as direct thematic continuation of the original must be coming from folks significantly older than the Gen-Xers and Millennials they’re pitching the Aladdin and Lion King remakes at.

Mary Poppins is indeed one of the studio’s biggest and best-known non-animated blockbusters – they even made an entire movie about Walt Disney’s attempt to secure the rights to it and cast Tom Hanks in it, after all. And unless the entirety of the Disney canon was just banned in your house I imagine most kids of successive generations still had it in the rotation. But it does unquestionably belong to an entirely different epoch of the studio’s history, one that’s nowhere near as immortal as the animated fairytales.

Now that’s not to say Returns isn’t “good” or that I didn’t like it or that I don’t think “kids today” will like it – quite the opposite in all three cases; it’s really pretty delightful if you can let yourself groove on it. More just an observation that, though it’s a fairly perfect movie content and energy-wise for even the very youngest children, I feel like this is the rare family blockbuster where the older the family member the more excited they’ll be simply about the fact that it exists and pulls off it’s “feel like the first one” magic trick.

And that is the main angle: The story picks up a couple decades after the 1910 set original with Jan and Michael Banks now grown and looking after Michael’s three children in the Banks house following the untimely early death of their mother. Having run into financial trouble, the house about to be repossessed and with all hope seeming lost, magical (and seemingly immortal) nanny Mary Poppins suddenly reappears; offering to look after the kids but (as with last time) actually low-key nudging the grownups into getting their shit together and remembering what’s really important.

As before, that means engaging in a series of lightly-comedic adventures all set to elaborate song and dance numbers involving (though naturally with new songs and new twists on the formula) a visit to an animated world, a miraculous cleanup ritual, a sojourn to meet a wacky magical relative of Mary’s with an oddball living situation inhabited by a celebrity cameo, an elaborate slapstick-stunt performance framed around kindly members of the London working-class, a sombre heartstring-tugger “lets be serious” song that becomes a plot point and an soaring ode to carefree outdoor merriment to bring it all home. And also as before most of the songs are good, a few a GREAT, the one for the cameo is somewhat superfluous and yes the two big ones that serve specifically as showcases for Lin Manuel-Miranda (here playing a lamp-lighter introduced as a former apprentice to Burt the chimneysweep from the original) are both very catchy.

To be clear: Yes, there is very deliberate beat-for-beat following of the original in plot and tone at play here – this isn’t a Christopher Robin or Maleficent-style revisiting or recontextualizing of the material: They’re not trying to tell you anything new about the characters, expand some sort of mythos, change any perception of who Mary is or what she’s up to. Everything about this movie is trying its damndest to look and feel like the sequel they could’ve made 2 or 3 years right after the first one but just… didn’t. And if that’s what you’re down for (and can accept different actors taking on fairly iconic roles) I think it’s going to work for you as it did for me – which is to say quite a bit.

What I’m more curious about is how this all plays to anyone who doesn’t have a particularly strong nostalgic connection to either the original or the era of Disney musical it typifies: Even in it’s day, Mary Poppins was a very strange confection that really only Walt Disney could’ve gotten away with unleashing: A relentlessly up-tempo musical of comedy numbers and patter songs shaped around a morality-play of distinctly Americana-flavored homespun wisdom awkwardly yet successfully transposed into an anachronistically cheerful early-1900s London setting. Who can say if the audience is there for that in 2018, but then again who but Disney knew they there for it in the 60s?

The big overriding question, of course, is how Emily Blunt pulls off Mary Poppins herself i.e. can anyone revive a character permanently associated with a single iconic performance given by a singular artist that requires one to not only give a fairly difficult performance covering drama, deadpan-comedy, banter but also sing and dance in multiple styles? And while it’s clear from the moment she arrives onscreen that she achieves the look and affect to an almost alarming degree; the effect and performance are almost SO good that it feels limiting to both actresses to say that suggest that she merely “recreates” Julie Andrews. Instead one honestly comes away feeling more like Mary Poppins must have been an actual person and now two actresses have done uncanny turns as her.

I’m sure a few more viewings or side-by-side comparisons will yield more noticeable differences, but the bottom line is that while the film itself manages an impossible feat simply by being a solid but not exactly as good successor to the original (I feel like it’s missing the “big” all-is-lost plunge and crescendo that the stretch from “The Life I Lead” to Mr. Banks walking back to work alone gives the first) whatever the – for lack of a better word – “magic” was that Andrews harnessed, Blunt finds again here and it’s almost scary HOW good she is.

Yes, she belts out the songs, she dances, she nails the mannerisms and the poise – you’ve seen that in the trailers. But there’s a few beats early where they cut to medium-closeup for the “mischevious smile just for the audience” bit” that hit more like: “OH! Wow, okay. There she is.” that I’m not sure I was suitably prepared for. Mary Poppins Returns is a thoroughly enjoyable, light, cotton-candy confection of a movie that will also serve as a nostalgia-trip of varying levels of intensity for some of a previous also thoroughly enjoyable, light cotton-candy confection of a movie. I don’t know that it’s a classic in its own right, but it’s a really good time.